Éric Weil (/veɪl/; French: [vɛjl]; 4 June 1904 - 1 February 1977) was a French-German philosopher noted for the development of a theory that places the effort to understand violence at the center of philosophy.

Calling himself a post-Hegelian Kantian, Weil was a key figure in the 20th century reception of Hegel in France, as well as the renewed interest in Kant in that country.

The author of major original works, critical studies, and numerous essays in French his adopted language, as well as German and English, Weil was both an active academic as well as public intellectual.

Involved in various fecund moments of French intellectual life, Weil was, for example, a participant in the famous lectures given by Alexandre Kojève on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, and would go on to play an instrumental role at the journal Critique during its start and then serve as one of its editors for a number of years.

[2] This influence was also at the origin of the creation of the Institut Éric Weil, a foundation and research library created by a group of his former students after his death.

These books show how the effort to understand violence by subsuming it under a discursive form is the basis of philosophical reflection.

Between Hamburg and Berlin, Weil started his doctoral studies and eventually wrote his dissertation "Des Pietro Pomponazzi Lehre von dem Menschen und der Welt" under Cassirer.

Moving again back to Berlin from Hamburg in 1930, Weil became the personal secretary to the philosopher Max Dessoir, and became involved in the publication of his journal Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft.

During this tumultuous period Weil read Mein Kampf and understanding the political implications on him as a Jew, he started looking towards his options abroad.

He produced his study "Ficin et Plotin" around the Neoplatonism of Marsilio Ficino and his attempts, through the work of Plotinus, to fuse Platonism and Christianity.

Around this time, he started the work that would culminate in the Logique de la philosophie as a reflection around the role that philosophical categories and discursive rationality play in history.

His association with Alexandre Koyré, to whom the Logique de la philosophie was dedicated, also started during this period, collaborating with him on the journal Recherches Philosophiques from 1934 to 1938.

This was not only because he was a German Jew, and so felt more deeply than gentile Europe the initial, and final, pressures of the Nazi regime, but also because this war provides and clear picture of Weil's philosophical, political, and human commitments.

In this work Weil sets up a fundamental antinomy between liberty and violence, and shows how discursive rationality is the result of the interplay between these two forces.

At the start of the war Weil took a fake name, Henri Dubois, and enlisted in the French army and go to the front to combat the Nazi regime.

Returning to Paris, Weil almost immediately secured a post as a researcher at CNRS, and within the year he was able to finish writing the Logique de la philosophie.

Over the next several years Weil would be active in Parisian philosophical and intellectual circles, organizing numerous conferences, participating in seminars, writing articles.

He was able to secure entrance into French higher education as a Maître de Conférences (Junior Professor) and found his first permanent post at the University of Lille.

In addition he would publish a book dealing with Kant, Problèmes Kantiens, and at the urging of his students two collections of his articles and shorter works, Essais et Conférences I (1970) and II (1971).

He was one of the philosophers chosen to participate in the UNESCO Symposium on Democracy, alongside the likes of John Dewey, Henri Lefebvre, C. I. Lewis, Richard McKeon and others.

Present at this meeting were philosophers including P. F. Strawson, Chaïm Perelman, J. L. Austin, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, W. V. Quine, and Jean Wahl.

[17] Therefore, the introduction to the Logique, which presents the critical project, does so by taking on a diversity of viewpoints and examining different possibilities in order to situate the rest of the text in a philosophical continuity.

However, the entire introduction is a sustained effort to highlight the difficulty of the project of definition and how the attribution of conceptual content is itself a problematic endeavor, and centers the body of the text's theme on discourse.

The categories are: Truth, Nonsense, The True and the False, Certainty, Discussion, The Object, The Self, God, Condition, Conscience, Intelligence, Personality, The Absolute, The Oeuvre, The Finite, Action, Meaning, and finally, Wisdom.

However the passage to The Absolute also highlights another feature of Weil's philosophical project, which is to create discursive tools to thematize violence in order to overcome it.

"[28] The interplay between the categories and the attitudes, as well as all of the fragments of historical attempts to overcome violence through the elaboration of coherent discourse that make up the language of the tradition, are mediated by what Weil calls reprises.

[30] In this way "the reprise, to use a Kantian concept, is the Schema which makes the category applicable to reality and which thus allows concretely realizing the unity of philosophy and of history".

Although Weil's political philosophy is strongly influenced by notions that are passed down from Aristotle, Kant, Hegel,[47] and Marx,[48] it is important to note his focus on the concrete aspects of human life as it is lived.

In order for that coherence to be an actual concrete articulation of meaning, this leads the individual to become aware of their discursive commitments through open discussion.

In this way a cosmopolitan global structure of States links back to the ultimate goal of Weil's theoretic philosophy, which is to explain the unity of action and discourse.